Multitask Semantic Boundary Awareness Network for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

In remote sensing images, boundary information plays a crucial role in land-cover segmentation. However, it is a challenging problem that sufficiently extracts complete and sharp boundaries from complex very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. To tackle this problem, we propose a semantic boundary awareness network (SBANet). The SBANet captures refined boundary information of land covers in feature extraction and then supervises its learning with a designed boundary loss. The key of SBANet includes boundary attention module (BA-module) and adaptive weights of multitask learning (AWML). The BA-module is proposed to capture land-cover boundary information from hierarchical features aggregation in a bottom-up manner. It emphasizes useful boundary information and relieves noise information in low-level features with the guidance of high-level features. To directly learn the boundary information, AWML adds a boundary loss to the original semantic loss by an adaptive fusion manner. This multitask learning enables the semantic information and the boundary information to work collaboratively and promote each other. Note that the BA-module and AWML are plug-and-play. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SBANet on the available ISPRS 2-D semantic labeling Potsdam and Vaihingen data sets. The SBANet also achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of overall accuracy (OA) and mean <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F_{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> score (m- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F_{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ).